Swolog

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I started lifting 10 years ago using the Starting Strength 5x5 iOS app¹. I would still recommend it for beginners.

Then when I switched programs to 6 day Push/Pull/Legs ², I switched to a paper notepad with just handwritten weights and reps like so:

Since my progression solely depended on the last time and the goal was to do “moar”, with a 6 day split it was easy, just flip 3 pages before and compare.

Eventually I started using multiple gyms, and didn’t have the notebook with me, so I switched to a long note in the Notes.app on iOS. There the comparison to previous time was more tedious, one had to scroll up and down.

Naturally I made an app. I started by making it an iOS app, but quickly abandoned that since I realized nobody will ever use it and I do not want to go through the review process.

Then I made it into a progressive web app.

You can find it here: https://apps.yozy.net/swolog/web

Note that I made this app for me. I am sharing it with the world since it is based on many open source contributions. I am licensing it under AGPLv3, but I provide no support, or would answer for any feature requests.

I have used the Stronglifts app back around 2016, so I can’t say how it has evolved. ↩︎
I really like the 6 day split, even though these days I usually do it over 2 weeks rather than a single one. Link Archive ↩︎

Re-evaluating Sports Science

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The last couple of weeks have been a whirl.

Recap

Solomon Nelson¹ has published a video essay tearing down Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis².
Using Milo Wolf³ as a mouthpiece, Mike has made a response video . Mike claims that Solomon has reviewed an old draft of the document. This draft was allegedly—by no one’s mistake— uploaded by Mike to the University’s servers. Milo has read an alleged “much later version” where most of the mistakes were corrected.
Jeff Nippard⁴ commented on Solomon’s critique with a truly ignorant comment:

Bro was out here adding semicolons to mikes rough draft from 13 years ago thinking he did something

– Jeff Nippard
Greg Doucette⁵ has chimed in (because of course he did) suspecting that the “much later draft” was a forgery.
It turned out that the “much later version” was indeed a forgery and was even older than the version that Solomon has reviewed. Mike Israetel admitted this himself in an Instagram post.

Why does this matter

We could dismiss what is happening here as your Tuesday YouTube drama. However, I think that it has some larger impact.

Sports science peer review is bottom of the barrel tier. The field is already criticised for poor studies due to small sample sizes and bad methodology, while needing to deal with extreme inter and intra subject variance Adding abysmal review standards and the “science” label evaporates.

Jeff Nippard’s behavior also makes it clear that scientific method plays a second fiddle to the protection of the group.

What I’m saying that sports science is useless.

What I’m going to do

With more studies are being published⁶ disproving previously touted methods for optimizing training⁷, I am going back to the tried and tested methods of bros. Yes, bros have won.

The new, revised, training recommendations

Consistency – Showing up day after day, month after month, year after year is the only way to build reasonable amount of muscle.
Technique – Can’t lift if you hurt yourself.
Close to Failure – In order to grow muscle, the training has to be challenging.
Volume – The more you train, the better the results. No top end has been found, keep your technique in check so you don’t get hurt.

That’s it. Everything else (e.g.: progressive overload) is corollary of these four basic steps